10/2/2006

Netflix is running a contest to improve recommender prediction systems. A 10% improvement over their current system yields a $1M prize. Failing that, the best smaller improvement yields a smaller $50K prize. This contest looks quite real, and the $50K prize money is almost certainly achievable with a bit of thought. The contest also comes with a dataset which is apparently 2 orders of magnitude larger than any other public recommendation system datasets.

9 Comments to “$1M Netflix prediction contest”

I’m currently in Tom Mitchell’s ML class and of course this is announced just as it comes time to pick a semester project. Very tempting… Are recommender systems an interesting problem, aside from the money attached to them?

I’m sure the publicity will earn them $1M back ! Not so sure if the improved recommendation system would make any difference…and in case no one wins it, so much publicity for 50k is almost free publicity !

I assume another motivation of Netfix is to let a number of researchers work for them with almost no salary. Imagine what it would cost for Netfix to employ all of us who participate in the competition in order to get the same results.